Machine translation post-editing is the process of manually correcting the output of a machine translation system to provide flawless translations. Machine translation combined with manual post-editing of machine translated content is typically much less expensive than entirely manual translation. Manual post-editing also allows the quality of the machine translation system to be assessed by counting the number of post-edits required to obtain a flawless translation. More post-edits are assumed to correspond to lower machine translation quality, while fewer post-edits are assumed to correspond to higher machine translation quality.
One challenge associated with the post-editing of machine translated content is that this process can mix together two kinds of post-edits: actual corrections of the translation (i.e. cases where the machine translation does not reflect the input source content); and content improvement post-edits (i.e. cases where the machine translation is correct, but the source content was sub-optimal and was therefore improved during the post-editing process). Because content improvement post-edits are unrelated to the machine translation process, mixing together different types of post-edits in this manner diminishes the capability of translation quality estimation systems to measure the quality of machine translation systems using approaches that count the number of post-edits required to obtain a flawless translation.
The disclosure made herein is presented with respect to these and other considerations.